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6.7.11

The top 11 (or 23) unanswered questions in neuroscience

This post has been in my draft for a while, and recently it came up as a question over at Quora, so I finally got around to finishing it.

What are the really big questions right now in neuroscience?

This is a fun game that a lot of neuroscientists like to play (usually over a few drinks). Generally our responses fall under one of two categories (of which I'd argue all others are just more detailed sub-questions). They are:

Consciousness WTF!?

How can atoms and molecules combine to a behaving animal?

When I was first starting my PhD there was a series of book chapter PDFs that were getting passed around from a book co-authored and edited by David Eagleman and Patricia Churchland that was supposedly going to be published in 2006 titled, Ten Unsolved Questions of Neuroscience.

As far as I can tell, that book never saw print, though you can find the draft chapters online in that link above. The authors of the chapters in that non-book are an excellent selection of outstanding neuroscientists from 2006.

Now, it seems that the woo woo crowds (and bad science journalists) have a tendency to pull out the word neuroplasticity about as readily as they will the word quantum when "explaining" certain nebulous phenomena. This is so common that "neuroplasticity" is becoming a dirty word.

I find it interesting that Eagleman chose to replace the question about neuroplasticity with the question about consciousness for the Discover piece.

You know you're in bad shape when consciousness seems to be the more reasonable alternative.

Jordan Grafman has a fun, short article published in Brain and Cognition in 2000 titled, Picking Two Scientific Roses for the Next Century. In that, he highlights neuroplasticity as a major research endeavor, but he breaks it down more scientifically:

"Neuroplasticity has at least four distinctive expressions:

(1) Flexibility of local cortical (representational) maps to expand and contract and to store new items;

(2) Homologous region adaptation—-for example, when brain damage affects the left parietal lobe, can the right parietal lobe reorganize itself to allow the representation of forms of information previously stored in the left parietal lobe?

(3) Sensory substitution where one cortical area previously committed to processing information in one sensory domain (e.g., vision) adapts to input from a different sensory domain (e.g., touch);

(4) Compensatory reorganization where the remaining components of a configured cognitive process perform well enough so that the person can achieve the desired performance outcome (even if it is now accomplished somewhat differently than before)."

A ton of exciting research has been done on these questions since that writing.

In addition to the Eagleman list, there's a more specifically detailed list from a book edited by J. Leo van Hemmen and Terry Sejnowski called (PDF) 23 Problems in Systems Neuroscience which was published in 2006 by Oxford University Press.

While there is certainly overlap with the Eagleman questions, the van Hemmen/Sejnowski list includes more biologically-specific, "lower-level" questions, as opposed to Eagleman's "higher-level" conceptual questions:

Shall We Even Understand the Fly's Brain?

Can We Understand the Action of Brains in Natural Environments?

Hemisphere Dominance of Brain Function--Which Functions Are Lateralized and Why?

What Is the Function of the Thalamus?

What Is a Neuronal Map, How Does It Arise, and What Is It Good For?

What Is Fed Back?

How Can the Brain Be So Fast?

What Is the Neural Code?

Are Single Cortical Neurons Soloists or Are They Obedient Members of a Huge Orchestra?

What Is the Other 85 Percent of V1 Doing?

Which Computation Runs in Visual Cortical Columns?

Are Neurons Adapted for Specific Computations?

How Is Time Represented in the Brain?

How General Are Neural Codes in Sensory Systems?

How Does the Hearing System Perform Auditory Scene Analysis?

How Does Our Visual System Achieve Shift and Size Invariance?

What Is Reflected in Sensory Neocortical Activity: External Stimuli or What the Cortex Does with Them?

Do Perception and Action Result from Different Brain Circuits?

What Are the Projective Fields of Cortical Neurons?

How Are the Features of Objects Integrated into Perceptual Wholes That Are Selected by Attention?

Where Are the Switches on This Thing?

Synesthesia: What Does It Tell Us about the Emergence of Qualia, Metaphor, Abstract Thought, and Language?

What Are the Neuronal Correlates of Consciousness?

This is a great list because the problems are (generally) better defined and seem more tractable. But it's less fun for the same reason!

There are dozens of paper citations I'd love to add here to complement that list, but that would take forever. So if you're more interested in any specific topic, shoot me a message in the comments and I'll try and point you to some of my favorite references.

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Who I Am

Neuroscientist combining large scale data-mining, machine-learning techniques, and brain computer interfacing with hypothesis-driven experimental research to understand the relationships between the human frontal lobes, cognition, and disease. Into really geeky stuff. World zombie neuroscience expert. Also run brainSCANr.com with my wife, Jessica.